Steve Hochstadt: Angry ranters are all over the web. The anonymity of virtual communication encourages their vituperation. The racist, know-nothing, jingoist language of online political commentators would be shocking if expressed in person.

Jessie Daniels: The fact is hate groups are growing offline, in person, and face-to-face. The people in these groups then use the Internet to stay connected and reinforce their beliefs and connect with still others who share those beliefs.

Sylvia Moore: On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission voted on new rules that critics say could allow media conglomerates to decide whose content gets to be seen on the Internet and whose doesn’t. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is said to have the votes he needs to pass net neutrality regulation.

Marshall Poe: In the end, the message is the message, and the message transmitted over virtually all modern media, the Internet included, is this: buy something. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way things are in our world. It’s time to face it—the Internet changes nothing.

Tina Dupuy: The concept of Net Neutrality is simple – all content should be treated equally. The Internet should be, as it has been, a level playing field. Waxman, the chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, said any bill about the issue would have to come out of his committee. What’s taking so long? The hold up is that the term “Net Neutrality” sounds like a fishing ordinance instead of what Senator Al Franken describes as “the free speech issue of our time.”

Sylvia Moore: It’s terrific that Waxman remains on the right side of this issue. For those of us hoping that he would use his position to make net neutrality a higher priority in the House, we were disappointed.

Marian Wang: At stake is the principle of net neutrality — the idea that Internet service providers must treat all traffic equally, and not privilege certain content by giving it more, or less, bandwidth — a principle that the FCC has been more aggressive about implementing under the Obama administration.

Sylvia Moore: As if the proposed Comcast/NBC Universal merger just wasn’t enough, the nation’s big broadcasters are strapping on the feed bag, ready to engorge themselves with more tasty snacks of the public’s television and radio airwaves.

Georgianne Nienaber: Keenan is especially critical of NGOs that “overstate what they have done since the quake. They want their names stamped all over this (disaster).” What she says is true. The logos of international “charitable” organizations are more numerous than the number of tents in the IDP camps. Make no mistake about it charity is “corporate business” in Haiti.

LGBT Rights

Irene Monroe: Long before June officially became Gay Pride Month, and October “Coming Out Month” for the LGBTQ community, Halloween was unofficially our yearly celebrated “holiday,” dating as far back at the 1970s when it was a massive annual street party in San Francisco’s Castro district.

The Middle East

Richard Greeman: Anti-government demonstrations spread across Morocco after social media spread the story of Mousine Fikri, a fishmonger crushed to death inside a garbage truck as he tried to block the destruction of a truckload of his fish confiscated by police.